Tag Archives: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

May 16, 2013 · 5:40 AM

Four Better Ways To Spend The $55 Million Wasted On Votes To Repeal The Affordable Care Act

The irony seems to escape the GOP and their sycophants  in Congress.  They’ve implemented “sequestration” to curb superfluous spending yet waste $55 million dollars on trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act thirty-seven times…

Think Progress

For the 37th time since 2011, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday, bringing the total cost of all of their failed repeal votes to roughly $55 million in taxpayer money, according to one estimate.

Last year, CBS News calculated that the number of hours spent on 33 repeal votes — then roughly 80 hours, or two full work weeks — cost taxpayers an estimated $48 million. Since then, Republicans have held three more votes (another $4.5 million) and will add another $1.5 million with their latest.

At a time when lawmakers have implemented $85 billion in across-the-board cuts on top of$1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, no dollar can be spared. And the country has serious health-related needs that could use funding. Here are some better health care uses for the more than $50 million these symbolic votes against the Affordable Care Act have wasted:

1. Restore cuts from sequestration to Title X family planning programs and Title V maternal and child health services. The National Women’s Law Center calculates that a 5 percent cut to the budgets of each program will reduce them by $15 million and $32.5 million, respectively. Rather than voting to repeal a bill that expands women’s access to preventative services, the House could use the money to expand them.

2. Double the Department of Justice’s budget for sexual assault services, which has currently been authorized a $50 million budget. The program gives money to states so that they can support rape crisis centers and other nongovernmental organizations that provide direct intervention, core services, and other assistance to the victims of sexual assault. Current funding is inadequate, as some states receive less than $300,000 and many programs lack the resources to meet victims’ needs.

3. Grant a request for $50 million to train 5,000 new mental health professionals as part of a new initiative to expand mental health treatment and prevention services. This proposal came in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting to address gaps in the mental health system.

4. Help states implement paid leave policies. President Obama included a $50 million State Paid Leave Fund in his 2011 budget to provide start-up support for states that want to enact paid leave for workers. More than 40 percent of workers don’t have access to paid sick leave, heading to work when they or their family members experience an illness, but this funding could help give them a better option.

The current Congress is on track to be the most unproductive since the 1940s, but still has time to hold votes that won’t result in actual legislative change. There are many other priorities lawmakers could focus on instead and better ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

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May 12, 2013 · 6:13 AM

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare

Despicable bullies come to mind when I see how members of Congress will stop at nothing to get their way…

TPM

Your big Obamacare story of the day is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell won’t recommend commissioners to the Independent Payment Advisory Board — a panel designed to contain Medicare spending — as the law asks them to.

This isn’t a huge surprise given how, er, eager Republicans have been to smooth Obamacare implementation in general. But it’s more revealing, and just as ironic, as their other efforts to break or hinder the law before it takes full effect.

It’s not just that Boehner and McConnell hate Obamacare and it’s not just that they’re hypocrites about spending. What they’re saying with their actions is that if they can’t convert Medicare from a single-payer into a private insurance system, they’d rather the whole thing collapse under its own weight. President Obama’s and Paul Ryan’s Medicare plans both envision budget caps for Medicare — the difference is that Ryan wants to let private insurers enforce it while Obama leaves the task to providers, with IPAB as a backstop. The parties are actually in about the same place fiscally with respect to Medicare, but unless reaching a more sustainable trajectory means privatizing the program, Republicans will try to keep it unsustainable.

Unfortunately for them, the story’s not that simple. The GOP can’t straightforwardly nullify or hobble IPAB by withholding or blocking nominees, the way it can and does with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board. The IPAB can seemingly function with fewer than 15 confirmed members, and even if Senate Republicans filibuster all nominees, the ACA includes a backstop that basically allows the Health and Human Services Secretary to act as a one-woman payment board. So just as states’ rights-loving governors are ceding their sovereignty to the federal government instead of setting up insurance exchanges of their own, Boehner and McConnell are effectively handing power to the executive branch in lieu of doing what the law asks them and maintaining influence over the policy.

Now that may not be a power that the Obama administration wants to exercise. And its not one that’ll necessarily remain in Democratic hands forever. So it’s not a perfect alternative to IPAB. But it’s also not a win-win for Boehner and McConnell. The GOP base might appreciate it, but it’s probably counter to their substantive interests.

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April 30, 2013 · 5:52 PM

Republican Refusal to Fix the Sequester Has Created a Death Panel For the Poor

Undoubtedly, we can count on the GOP to continue to not give a crap…

PoliticusUSA

Throughout history, human beings have debated, and decided that the power of life and death is not within the purview of human beings except in times of war and in countries that cling to the barbaric practice of capital punishment. It is certainly true that no population would willingly give a government arbitrary power of life and death over its own citizens, and yet it became a popular claim shortly after Barack Obama became President. In 2009, the immutable American idiot, Sarah Palin, propagated what was deemed the “Lie of the Year” when she went around the country declaring the Affordable Care Act would impose a panel of bureaucrats who would hold the power of life and death over Americans.

Republicans however, have assumed the power of life and death over Americans in need of basic sustenance, shelter, and healthcare over the past two years in their pursuit of trickle down fiscal purity, austerity for austerity sake, and Draconian spending cuts targeting safety nets.  Despite warnings the sequester would arbitrarily cut access to food, housing assistance, and healthcare for the elderly, children, and Veterans, Republicans proudly imposed the sequester on the nation as a necessary step to abridge the phony debt crisis they manufactured with valuable assistance from ignorant Democrats anxious to join the austerity frenzy.

For four years, Republicans prevented the government from operating through obstructionism that effectively shut down normal government processes, and yet when their sequester inconvenienced affluent Americans with the horrid prospect of an hour-long flight delay, they jumped into action and passed legislation within a week to unburden their favorite Americans from sharing in the sacrifice the rest of the nation will suffer for over nine more years. However, their quick action did not go unnoticed by other Americans who face hunger, homelessness, and slow painful death as a result of sequestration cuts that are, for all intents and purposes, their version of death panels.

Continue reading here…

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April 26, 2013 · 10:32 AM

SENATE: SORRY, POOR PEOPLE!

Senate fixes the (part of the) sequestration (that affects rich people)!

Washington is not just broken, it needs an exorcist!

Salon

Just in time for members to fly home, Congress averts the one cut it cares about. Hint: Not Head Start!

After a month or so of the sequestration budget cuts only affecting people Congress doesn’t really care about, the cuts hit home this week when mandatory FAA furloughs caused lengthy flight delays cross the country. Suddenly, sequestration was hurting regular Americans, instead of irregular (poor) ones! Some naive observers thought this would force Congress to finally roll back the purposefully damaging cuts that were by design never intended to actually go into effect. Those observers were.. sort of right! The U.S. Senate jumped into action last night and voted to… let the FAA transfer some money from the Transportation Department to pay air traffic controllers so that the sequestration can continue without inconveniencing members of Congress, most of whom will be flying home to their districts today. The system works! (For rich people, like I’ve been saying.)

The Washington Post says, “The Senate took the first step toward circumventing sequestration Thursday night” though in fact what they did was work to ensure that the sequester continues not affecting elites, who fly regularly. I am embarrassed that I did not predict this exact outcome in my column Tuesday morning. The Senate, which can’t confirm a judge without months of delay and a constitutional crisis, passed this particular bill in about two minutes, with unanimous consent. The hope is that the House can get it taken care of today, I guess in time for everyone to fly to Aspen or wherever people whom Congress listens to fly to on Fridays.

After that Congress will be done fixing all the various problems with the design and implementation of the sequestration:

But House action on a broader deal to undo the across-the-board cuts appears remote. House conservatives say much of the impact has been exaggerated by the White House, and they have relished the success of forcing visible spending cuts on a Democratic administration.

“I think it’s the first time we’ve saved money in Washington, D.C.,” said Representative Raúl Labrador, Republican of Idaho. “I think we need to move on from the subject.”

Move on, people who may become homeless! We fixed the airports, what more do you want?

There was a big to-do yesterday about a Politico story insisting — explosively! morning-winningly! — that Congress was trying to exempt itself from Obamacare. Because this is Politico, the story was based on equal parts misunderstanding of policy and desire to create a fuss. The actual story is that Republicans proposed forcing members of Congress and their staffs to only use healthcare plans created by Obamacare or available in the exchanges. Democrats passed the amendment, as a sort of fuck you. But the exchanges are designed for people who don’t have employers who pay for healthcare. Congressional staffers get employer-sponsored health benefits. The exchanges are explicitly not designed for employees of large employers who pay for healthcare, so some people are right now trying to figure out how to make sure staffers continue to get healthcare. It may end up not being a big deal, or it may require a tweak to the law. But it’s not a scandal. (Honestly it’s all a pretty good argument for ditching employer-based healthcare in favor of universal single-payer but then again everything is.)

But the fuss was already created. The story will live forever, and no amount of debunking in the world will kill the popular myth that Congress attempted to secretly “exempt” itself from Obamacare. So self-serving!

Their staffers are generally the poorest people members of Congress know, and trying to make sure their healthcare is paid for is seriously the closest our legislature gets to altruism. But while the story of Congress working to make sure its staffers don’t have to shoulder the entirety of their premium costs because of Republican political stuntmanship was treated as a scandal and an example of everything rotten about Congress, the story of Congress hurriedly making sure the well-off minority of Americans who fly regularly don’t get briefly inconvenienced — while ignoring the costs of brutal cuts on programs for low-income Americans facing housing or hunger crises — is treated as a wonderful and encouraging display of bipartisanship.

Have a great flight home, senators!

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March 27, 2013 · 7:56 AM

An Affordable Care Act report card, three years in

Obama’s signature on Affordable Care Act

This is great news…

Daily Kos

The Sunday New York Time’s editorial page celebrated the third anniversary of the Affordable Care Act by detailing some of its achievements, even ahead of its full implementation next year. That includes:

  • Some 6.6 million people ages 19 through 25 who have been able to stay on their parents’ insurance plans and more than than 3 million young adults getting health insurance.
  • 17 million getting some kind of free preventive service, like flu shots, and 34 million Medicare recipients getting free preventive services in 2012;
  • 17 million children with pre-existing conditions being protected against being uninsured;
  • More than 107,000 adults with pre-existing conditions finally having insurance under the federally run insurance program;
  • 21 million received care from expanded community health centers, 3 million more than previously served;
  • $1.1 billion in rebates, an average of $151 per family paid by insurers that failed to meet the benchmark of 80 to 85 percent of premium revenues on medical claims or quality improvements;
  • Since 2010, more than 6.3 million older or disabled people have saved more than $6.3 billion on prescription drugs;

Beyond that, as the editorial notes, the annual growth of health care expenses has declined sharply, both in private care and Medicare. But the focus on quality of care seems to be working. “The percentage of Medicare patients requiring readmission to the hospital within 30 days of discharge dropped from an average of 19 percent over the past five years to 17.8 percent in the last half of 2012.” That’s largely because Medicare can impose penalties now for poor performance, but can also pay incentives for quality care.

Not a bad track record for the first three years, before the meat of the reforms kick in. What’s particularly important—and so far ignored by policy-makers—is the real slowdown in the growth of health care costs. It suggests that Medicare isn’t a hair-on-fire emergency right now, and that any changes to it should be dealt with outside of deficit grand-bargaining. It’s not an immediate crisis.

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March 25, 2013 · 11:54 AM

Delgado: Is Conservatism Dead?

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

AJ Delgado at Mediaite:

What happened this month to make it so historic? Three key developments (or three death-knells):

1) Immigration reform is all but a foregone conclusion.

2) The gay marriage debate is essentially over. Why March 2013? It is when the momentum and timing all serendipitously fell into place.

3) The plan to defund ObamaCare — conservatives’ last stand after the Supreme Court failed to throw out the Act — is over.

Consider the magnitude: in this single month, three key, major tenets of conservatism – the battles against (1) amnesty; (2) gay marriage; and (3) socialized medicine (many rightly argue Obama is simply a stepping-stone to nationalized healthcare) – essentially vanished. Poof! Gone. Without these three, is conservatism (or what we generally know as mainstream conservatism) still even in existence?

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March 23, 2013 · 9:25 AM

On Obamacare’s Third Anniversary, Here Are Three Ways The Reform Law Has Helped Real Americans

I’m totally mystified by the opposition to Obamacare…

Think Progress

[Today] marks the three year anniversary of President Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping overhaul of the U.S. health care system since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. While some the law’s most significant provisions won’t go into full effect until next year, many of its important reforms have already taken hold — and have already changed the lives of real Americans for the better. Here are just a few ways that the Affordable Care Act has bolstered the health and financial security of Americans from all around the country:

1. Diabetic Arthur from California finally has health coverage after being uninsured for five years.

Refusing coverage and treatments for sick Americans due to their “pre-existing medical conditions” has always ranked among the insurance industry’s most reviled practices. For decades, Americans have recounted horror stories about battling insurance companies while loved ones suffered — like 4-month-old Alex Lange, who was turned away by an insurer for being born “obese.” Thanks to Obamacare, that’s no longer legal, as the consumer protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions has already gone into effect for children. It won’t be extended to all Americans until 2014 — but that doesn’t mean Obamacare hasn’t already changed the lives of adults with pre-existing conditions, too.

Through its state-based transitional Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) — a bridge program for American adults with pre-existing conditions that will cover them until the law is fully implemented — Americans like 56-year-old Arthur Yu have already been gaining coverage that was once unavailable to them. After losing his job in 2008 and running through his COBRA benefits, Yu remained uninsured for a full five years due to his diabetes and high cholesterol. “If something major happened to me, my savings would get wiped out,” he said. But after Obamacare’s passage, he was able to enroll in California’s PCIP program in 2012, giving him enormous financial — and medical — peace of mind.

2. Connie from Arizona got a $79 rebate from her insurance company in the mail.

On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that Obamacare has helped seniors save over $6 billion on their prescription drug costs by closing the so-called Medicare “donut hole” — and that’s not the only way that the law is already saving Americans money.

Because of Obamacare’s “80/20 rule” requiring insurers to spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they charge customers on actual medical care rather than overhead or profits, millions of Americans have received rebate checks — totaling $1.5 billion in 2011 alone — from their insurance companies in the mail. Arizona resident Connie Kadansky spoke to CNN about her personal experience with this measure after getting a $79 rebate from her insurer last summer, saying, “It was a surprise. My insurance agent tells me that my insurance is going to skyrocket. He hates Obamacare. I read the letter and I said to myself, ‘So what’s wrong with this? This is good.’”

3. Chronically ill Jen from Illinois doesn’t have to worry about losing access to her dad’s health insurance.

One of the reform law’s most popular aspects is allowing young Americans to stay on their parents’ health plan until they’re 26. In a time of economic uncertainty, that can mean the difference between life and death, and there are bountiful stories of how this Obamacare provision has personally touched real people. Last October, teenager Jen Rubino wrote a piecefor the Huffington Post in which she recounted her struggles with a rare chronic illness, and the constant worry that she would lose access to her father’s health insurance once she got older. But as Jen put it, “everything changed when President Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act.”

In fact, over the last several years, the percentage of uninsured young adults in America dropped by record numbers, down to 27.9 percent of young people in 2011 from 33.9 percent in 2010 — meaning that 1.6 million young Americans gained coverage in just the first year of Obamacare’s implementation.

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March 15, 2013 · 7:46 AM

Paul Ryan Budget Reduces Spending To Lowest Levels Since 1948: Report

Paul Ryan Budget Spending

Paul Ryan’s “Ayn Randian”  economic philosophy has prompted him to put forth a budget that would affect the working class and very poor in the most adverse way, while giving the top 1% more tax breaks and other perks.

The Huffington Post

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposed budget would reduce government spending outside of Social Security and interest on debt to its lowest levels in over six decades, Investor’s Business Daily reported Wednesday.

Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, unveiled his latest fiscal proposal on Tuesday, laying out $4.6 trillion in cuts over the next decade. The blueprint aims to balance the budget in 10 years by slashing Medicare, Medicaid and programs to aid the poor, including food stamps. Ryan’s plan would also repeal President Barack Obama’s health care reform law.

“This is not only a responsible, reasonable balanced plan,” Ryan said on Tuesday. “It’s also an invitation. This is an invitation to the president of the United States, to the Senate Democrats, to come together to fix these problems.”

Under the House GOP plan, government spending would hit its lowest levels in 65 years. Investor’s Business Daily’s Jed Graham reports:

By 2023, under Paul Ryan’s budget, the entirety of federal spending outside of Social Security and interest on the debt (16.4% of GDP in 2012) would shrink to 11.2% of GDP, a level not seen since 1948 — before ObamaCare, Medicare, Medicaid, NASA, the interstate highway system and almost before the first baby boomers were born.That is nearly 25% below the 14.6% of GDP average over the past 64 years. In the only three years over this span that saw spending on the main functions of government (outside of saving for retirement) dip just below 12% of GDP, the unemployment rate averaged 4.5% or less, shrinking safety net outlays while bolstering the spending capacity of state and local governments.

Graham also calculates that by leaving Medicare expenditures out as well as Social Security and interest, spending levels would shrink to 7.9 percent of GDP by 2023, the lowest level since 1938, before Social Security and Medicare programs were created.

Click here to read more on Ryan’s budget plan.

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March 12, 2013 · 8:45 PM

Paul Ryan’s “New” Plan: Squeeze the Poor, Boost the Rich

Rep. Paul Ryan trotted out yet another budget that looks like more of the same.   At this point I’m reminded of  the old George W. Bush “admonition“…

Mother Jones

Oh Lord. I almost forgot that today is Paul Ryan Day, even though I wrote about it just yesterday. So what’s in the 2014 version of the Ryan budget? Let’s see:

  • Repeal of Obamacare (though we keep Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare, as well as its new taxes).
  • Medicare would be converted into a voucher system.
  • Big cuts to Medicaid.
  • Big cuts to other domestic programs.
  • Repeal of the sequester cuts in the Pentagon budget.
  • A “simplified” income tax system with only two brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent.
  • A reduction in the corporate tax from 35 percent to 25 percent.

I’ll dive into the details later. Maybe. But basically this is the same old same old. Big tax cuts on the rich, big tax cuts for corporations, and big spending increases for the military. For the poor, the middle class, and the elderly, we have big spending cuts and—though Ryan doesn’t admit it—the almost mathematical certainty of big tax increases.

At this point, I honestly have only one wish for all this: that the press finally wises up and refuses to call this a “deficit reduction” plan. It’s not. It’s a plan to dramatically cut domestic spending, full stop, mostly on the poor, the middle class, and the elderly. Every other component of the plan increases the deficit.

~Kevin Drum

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March 11, 2013 · 6:50 AM

Ryan Budget Assumes Obamacare Repeal; Chris Wallace: ‘That’s Not Going To Happen’

Liberaland

Paul Ryan’s budget is based on a false premise.

WALLACE: Are you saying that as part of your budget you would repeal — you assume the repeal of Obamacare?

RYAN: Yes.

WALLACE: Well that’s not going to happen.

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